Thanksgiving and Bullshit

I visited my dad in Las Vegas for Thanksgiving.  Most of our conversations revolve around football and politics, and a Thanksgiving with three football games only three weeks after the mid-term elections was a somewhat perfect platform for father-son bonding.  

Good or bad, I’ve inherited Dad’s cynicism.  Dad got a history degree before studying law in Washington and briefly working with the White House in the Carter Administration.  He looks at America’s politics and sighs with the resignation of a historian—and he occasionally falls into the cantankerousness  of a recent retiree.  I sigh also, but with the disillusionment of a college student reading too much political philosophy, and maybe too much Noam Chomsky too.

The two of us sat comfortably in his living room—custom-made bamboo blinds and pillow-soft, cream-colored leather chairs.  “Do you know what really did it for me, when I knew it was all bullshit?” Dad asked me.  Like most parents, Dad has a tendency to re-tell stories, unaware I’ve been hearing them since childhood.  So I courteously feigned suspense: “What?”  But actually I hadn’t heard this one before. 

Dad told me about a sub-committee hearing where some Congressmen asked to have “real everyday women” (read: poor people) come to Washington to speak to Congress.  Five women from all over the country landed in DC.  They looked nice, presumably new dresses and pantsuits to look respectable.  They took photos on the steps of the Capitol with their Congressmen and shook hands.  They were put up in a nice hotel for the night.

The next morning they went to Congress to share their stories of struggle and survival in middle America.  For official purposes there apparently has to be a Congressman to hear the testimony of Congress’ witnesses.  And that’s what there was—one Congressman in an empty chamber with five women in their Sunday best.  And my dad too.

“How small and meaningless do you think they felt?  The looks on their faces when they realized it was all bullshit.  No one gave a shit about them or what they had to say.”

I thought that was a fitting story about our government for Thanksgiving.  After all, the myth behind that is just a bunch of bullshit too.

MB and Me on Movies

For this blog post and hopefully future ones I have invited my friend Mary Beth to respond to a question about movies.
  

Cole:

Last night we watched Michael Haneke's "The White Ribbon," about a German town just before World War I that undergoes a series of strange and brutal events, perhaps by the design of some really creepy children.  I think we both liked it, but I know we both also struggled to stay awake.  Like many artistic European films, this film just felt so long and slow.  What obligation do you think a director has to make his or her film entertaining?  Do you consider movies like "The White Ribbon" to be less good because they're boring?

MB:

First I would like to say that an artist has no obligation to make his or her artwork entertaining. Artists have a right to present their work however they think best suits it. The White Ribbon certainly fits the definition of art. It is beautifully shot; there is some very impressive acting; the story is affecting. It is altogether an admirable film. That said, by the middle of film I would have given my right arm for a car chase, a ticking time bomb, a pseudo-jive talking sidekick, anything to break up the monotony

When you have a boring film, you don’t necessarily have a failure of filmmaking. What you really have when you have to will yourself to finish a movie is a failure of storytelling. There is a reason that the oldest stories we have inherited from the past have been adventure epics. Beowulf hunts monsters. Moses works miracles as the leader of wandering gaggle of screw-ups. Odysseus soldiers on despite being shipwrecked, sidetracked, and seduced a dozen times. Gilgamesh wrestles with the beasts of heaven itself. The stories that endure not only have something to say but say it with excitement, intrigue, suspense, a little pizzazz. 

The best stories are also those that are tautly told. You can have descriptions of magnificent scenery or examinations of stymied ambition but underneath it all things have to move forward and be revealed. If that doesn’t happen a story feels self-indulgent and people don’t have the patience to wait for the storyteller to once again care that his or her audience is shifting in its seats and eying the door. Audiences can’t stand movies that don’t tell their story well and filmmakers that don’t have the inclination or the talent to be good storytellers deserve to have their work turned off with an hour left to watch. 

Cole:

I definitely agree with you that the artist, or filmmaker, doesn't have an obligation.  As a matter of artistic expression, any man can film himself shaving for two hours as far as I'm concerned, and there's a marketplace that selects the movies worth watching, via the highway robbery of modern-day ticket prices.

That brings me to your point about the stories that endure.  They have obviously survived in this marketplace for a very long time.  But does that really mean they're good?  Perhaps Homer was dismissed as too commercial in his day.  The blindness shtick had to annoy his competitors.  Maybe in the next town over there was another, less appreciated storyteller recounting the struggles of slaves or inventing social realism, but the audience of the time just didn't care.

In fact, your logic about the epics from past millenia frightens me that three hundred years from now people will still be watching Avatarwhile The White Ribbon lies idle on library shelves.  If that turns out to be the case, would we call James Cameron a superior storyteller to Herr Haneke? 

MB:

Dear God. Never let it be put in writing that I called Avatar a timeless classic.

With that chilling thought aside, maybe Cameron is a better storyteller. A better philosopher or examiner of the human existence? No. A man who can keep you hooked from scene to scene? Yes. I contend that the story of Avatar will eventually fade from consciousness. The most enduring tales (the ones that survive centuries) combine big ideas with a gift for spinning a yarn. Cameron was clearly out of his depth philosophically with Avatar. His filmmaking talent exceeded his grasp of the themes. But if given the choice between watching Avatar again with all its ham-handed lessons and watching 2001: A Space Odyssey again where we watch a ship dock fortwenty minutes (I cross myself as I say this as I know I speak blasphemy) I pick Avatar. And I hate that movie. If filmakers want their ideas to endure, they have to at least feign an interest in engaging the audience.

Works bursting with innovative, thought-provoking ideas are rediscovered later, but the best stories are never lost to begin with. They are passed on not just because they are edifying, but because they are enjoyable to experience. They entertain.

Cole:

The insult toward 2001: A Space Odyssey requires no detailed rebuttal here.  I trust time and your reliably good taste to accomplish this for me.


I think you're right that the golden mean of entertainment and insight makes a great film.  And to be honest, if I were forced to give up either The Ghostbusters or The Seventh Seal for all eternity I would quickly choose the former.  Once every twenty years I could put a cape on a creepy old Scandinavian, play chess for two hours, and be satisfied.

Unfortunately, if one refuses to watch boring movies, one also misses out on perhaps half of the "great films" in film history.  So now I'm just curious: knowing that they are likely to be as or more slow and ambiguous as The White Ribbon, do you plan to watch other films by Haneke, or his partners in plodding, Bergman, Tarkovsky, etc.?

MB:

I plan to watch more films by the less...thrilling directors, but since I have so much more of film history to explore, I have a feeling that their films will get pushed to the back (Hmm, I should probably watch more Bergman, but hey, isn't my knowledge of Hong Kong action film just as thin. John Woo it is!). Part of me wishes I had the patience but part of me thinks that directors shouldn't make movies that inspire about as much enthusiasm as flossing does.

(On a separate note I actively sought out The Seventh Seal and was enthralled. Meandering meditations on the nature of God and the existence of evil? Where is my popcorn?!)

They Hate Us For Anne Hathaway

While watching NFL football this weekend, the commentators dutifully thanked the men and women of the armed forces who are defending our freedom.  This is what everyone says now—that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are to defend our freedom.  Regardless of whether one supports or opposes the wars and how they’ve been conducted, I think there are basic arguments with which we can dismiss this notion. 

First, our enemies, al-Qaeda specifically, have never claimed to hate us because of our freedom.  Read speeches by Osama bin Laden and try to find where he says this.  In fact, Osama bin Laden himself responded to the freedom accusation in October 2004, saying—quite logically—that if freedom was his enemy, why didn’t he attack Sweden?   Obviously the murder of three thousand Americans was an assault on those individuals’ freedoms, as well as every other American's freedom to live without fear of terrorism, but the argument that the September 11 attacks were motivated by a hatred of freedom is not found in al-Qaeda’s own rhetoric.

Second, we are currently fighting two wars “for our freedom,” and neither one appears to be going very well.  And yet, we aren’t becoming less free.  If we were to lose a war to defend our freedom, wouldn’t it make sense that we’d have less freedom?  “Losing” the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (more than we already have lost in them) would arguably diminish our power and possibly our security, but it’s not like they’d take away the 1^st Amendment.

The point could be argued that our own government is the largest threat to our individual freedom.  That would seem to be something that anti-Patriot Act Progressives and Tea Partiers could actually agree on.

Isn’t it strange that our political leaders and mainstream media never told us the reasons bin Laden says he attacked the United States?  All of us would agree that despite whatever reasons bin Laden claimed, the September 11 attacks couldn’t be justified, but we should still at least know the actual reasons, for strategic and political purposes if nothing else.

There are obvious reasons that the hating freedom narrative took shape.  Optimistically, we could say that our country needed unity after September 11, and the hating freedom narrative was something we could all get behind.  More cynically, the hating freedom narrative allowed the government to mobilize popular support for their anti-terrorism agenda.  If the issue were our support of Israel, our military presence around the world, or our diplomatic support for dictatorships in Muslim countries (these are al-Qaeda’s actual complaints), then maybe Americans would have some debate about our response to the terrorist attacks.  But if freedom is threatened we go get our rifles, or—more precisely—we recruit poor and disenfranchised youth to go get their rifles.

What I have outlined is standard propaganda that is depressingly transparent and effective.  But hey, we have our freedom, right?

In the spirit of identifying erroneous reasons why we are fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and to illustrate my point, I will offer an equally plausible lie our government could have told us.  For example, I personally would have been more likely to be mobilized against terrorism if I had been told that they hated Anne Hathaway.  I mean, Anne Hathaway is so beautiful and she’s also—as she proved in Rachel Getting Married—a  very talented actress.  Here is a look at how the “War on Terror” could have been framed:

“For all who love Anne Hathaway and peace, the world without Saddam Hussein's regime is a better and safer place.” –George W. Bush

“I believe that God has planted in every heart the desire to live in Anne Hathaway”—George W. Bush

“We can’t allow the world’s worst leaders to threaten, blackmail, hold Anne Hathaway-loving nations hostage”—George W. Bush

“You can’t put democracy and Anne Hathaway back into a box”—George W. Bush

“This is not a battle between the United States of America and terrorism, but between Anne Hathaway and terrorism.”—Tony Blair

“Today we are engaged in a deadly global struggle for those who would intimidate, torture, and murder Anne Hathaway. If we are to win this struggle and spread Anne Hathaway, we must keep our own moral compass pointed in a true direction.”—Barack Obama

Fear not, Anne Hathaway.  We have a great plan to make sure they don’t win.  Just ask our president.

Shhhh

For years I’ve taken note of an interesting phenomenon in my adopted home—ASU’s Hayden Library. The concourse level of the Hayden Library is a common study zone, graphically represented a by a green traffic light that says it’s ok for group discussions. Even so, the concourse level is usually fairly quiet, perhaps with a generic, light hum from everyone’s hushed conversations. Somewhat frequently the stale but peaceful environment is disrupted by a group of loud people who lambently disobey basic rules of library behavior by running, laughing loudly, or calling to people who are far away.  But these are isolated incidents of ASU students trying to gain celebrity.


Probably once a week, however, something else disturbs my peace. It has two variations. Sometimes a group is studying together and they for some reason choose to speak in a normal volume, or “outside voice.” Either that or someone talks loudly on their cell phone to handle some urgent crisis. Both of these occurrences often have one thing in common: they are perpetrated by foreigners speaking in a foreign language.

Why do they not behave by the library rules? It’s like the loud American tourists that would ride public transportation in Istanbul, failing to notice that all the Turks sit quietly. Likewise, maybe in the home countries of these loud library people, libraries have different social norms—it might be commonplace to conduct regular conversations or business negotiations in the library.

But even if this were the case, shouldn’t they easily observe that everyone else is being very quiet and going outside to talk on their cell phones? Do you remember in elementary school, when the teacher would ask everyone to be quiet, and suddenly you and your friend would be the only ones still talking? I always felt such embarrassment at these moments. They should feel that way too!

My best guess is that it’s not actually the rules of being quiet that keep the rest of us—the natives, one might say—from socializing normally in the library. It might be that if we were to talk loudly, everyone would hear and understand what we had to say. We’re just not comfortable with that level of exposure.

For foreign language speakers, speaking in their native language protects them from this embarrassment. Their behavior in itself might be annoying, but at least no one knows what they’re saying. They could be guiding someone through heart surgery for all anyone else knows.

To properly test my theory, we would need to see how foreign students interact in the library in English-speaking situations. We would also of course have to observe how many “natives” also socialize loudly to make sure that I have not manufactured this theory from simple racism. Finally, we would have to place English speakers in foreign countries’ libraries and observe if their behavior changes. I find all of this sociologically interesting, but at the end of the day rules are rules.

People of Earth: Don’t make noise in the library—I’m trying to study!